The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed. In the course of integrated circuit evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased.
Various photolithography processes may need to be performed to fabricate these increasingly small ICs. A photoresist material is used in the photolithography processes. In particular, the photoresist material is often used to pattern the ICs and is removed after the patterning is complete. However, as lithography processes continue to evolve, existing photoresist materials may have performance shortcomings. For example, an Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography process may lack spectral purity for its light sources, meaning the light sources may produce undesirable out-of-band radiation, for example radiation having a bandwidth between 140 nanometers (nm) and 400 nm. Existing photoresist materials may be sensitive to the out-of-band radiation and may absorb such radiation. This would result in reduced contrast and hence degradation of imaging performance.
Therefore, while existing photoresist materials have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in every aspect.